This is not a full review... not even a mini review. I just wanted to post a note to say that I've now updated three Macs to 10.5 Leopard and all without a hiccup. Two of them were Archive and Installs and one was a wipe and install. I'm not at all surprised as I've installed everything from OS X Public Beta through 10.5 on my own Macs and many different versions on Macs owned by friends, family, and clients. Never a problem.

Now, as for first impressions. Let me just say that I am impressed! Time Machine set-up and first back-up went perfectly. I backed-up my MacBook Pro to a firewire drive attached to my Mac Mini so it took all night over the network but all seems well. Each update after that should be simple incremental updates and should not take long at all. Safari, Mail, iCal, iChat are all performing perfectly. Screen sharing and file sharing are excellent. Front Row is a fantastic improvement especially on the Mac Mini which is my iTunes music/movie server and is connected to a television. Front Row 2.0 is much faster and smoother than the first iteration!

That's it for now. I've got more exploring to do!

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, Macintosh, Leopard

So the time has come for a new version of Mac OS X. I installed Tiger on my Macs on the release date of April 29, 2005 just as I installed Panther on its release date. If all goes as planned I'll be installing Leopard on at least 3 Macs on Friday. I've been very happy with Tiger just as I was happy with Panther and Jaguar. Apple has done a tremendous job with the OS X series. Each new cat comes with stability, increased speed, and a variety of new features and refinements. I have little doubt that Leopard will be the same.

At home I'll be installing on three Macs. I'll be doing an "archive and install" on my G4 Mac Mini and my trusty old 12" PowerBook which now serves as a backup to my primary work machine, a MacBook Pro. I almost always use the archive and install option when installing a new version of OS X as it installs a completely fresh OS and moves the old system to a folder rather than an upgrade which goes through the current install and updates the current files in place. I'd rather start with a completely new install. The great thing about archive and install is that it keeps your third party applications intact as well as all of your user settings and files.

Another install option is the clean install which completely wipes the drive, erasing all data and then installing the new system. I rarely use this option but my MacBook Pro will get the special treatment this time around. Why? Over the past year I've used it to back up over 200 dvds and convert them to h264 encoded QuickTime files. I've also built up a 15 GB Aperture library and 15 GB music library. That's alot of disk usage, far more than most of my Macs have seen in the past and I think its worth the time to go ahead and wipe the drive. I use SuperDuper to back-up my home directory so bringing my new install up to date with my personal data and preferences will be a breeze. I'll use the opportunity to thin out the applications that I no longer use.

I generally do not worry too much about disk fragmentation as OS X does its own file defragmentation via processes such as "hot file adaptive clustering" which works primarily with smaller files when they are opened and saved. However, if you consistently work with larger files such as video files fragmentation may become an issue. You can learn more via this Apple doc.

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, Macintosh, Leopard